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BOSTON — Reports of a loud explosion from people across New England sent police agencies and others scrambling to understand what caused a double boom Saturday that shook buildings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
The American Meteor Society confirmed the boom was caused by a 3-foot meteor entering the atmosphere near the New Hampshire border with Massachusetts, north of Boston.
Robert Lunsford, the Fireball Program Monitor with the society, said the group received dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal with people either hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake or seeing the fireball, which he said looks like a shooting star in the daytime sky.
“It was definitely bigger than a normal fireball, about a yard wide,” he said.
Lunsford said it’s unlikely the meteor struck the ground.
“We would need more information about the trajectory the speed and other aspects to know for sure if it hit the ground. But if it didn’t burn up, then it would have landed in the ocean,” he said. “Most of them do burn up before they hit the ground.”
NASA said the meteor fragmented around 40 miles in the sky and the energy breakup was “estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tons of TNT, which accounts for the loud noise.”
People in a handful of states posted on social media about feeling the buildings they were in shaking. Several videos posted on X also captured what sounded like two quick booms, with no fire, smoke or other visual causes.
The boom was heard around 2 p.m. ET, reportedly shook homes and was unlike anything residents had felt.
“On our lightning mapper, on satellite data, you can see where exactly that came into the atmosphere very close to Boston, causing all of that excitement,” WBZ-TV Chief Meteorologist Eric Fisher said in a video.
The map shows a quick, blink and you miss it, flash of “lightning” that Fisher said was the meteor exploding.
Spaceflight meteorologist Nick Stewart concurred with the assessment because the large flash seen on weather tracking software “does not correlate with active thunderstorm.”
“The flash density product really shows this anomalous “flash” which is pretty distinctive of a bolide/meteor reentry east of Boston,” he wrote. “This is the likely source of the loud boom/explosion.”
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security said they were investigating reports about the “audible boom and ground tremors in Eastern Massachusetts,” but there are no known emergency requests connected to the boom and they “do not believe there is any public safety threat.”
The boom was reportedly heard dozens of miles around the Boston area, with residents taking to social media to document their experience with it.
“Heard and felt in Needham. We thought a tree fell on our house,” one person commented on Fisher’s video. Needham, Massachusetts is roughly 16 miles from Boston.
“The whole house, actually all houses in the neighborhood shook. Much louder than a transformer exploding and definitely not an earthquake,” a resident in Melrose, Massachusetts told WCVB.
Several people also filed reports with the U.S. Geological Survey, registering the shaking they felt with the National Earthquake Information Center, agency spokesman Steve Sobie confirmed Saturday.
The agency opened an event page, based on the number of “Did you feel it?” reports it received on its website. But he said there was no event registered on the agency’s seismographs. meaning the shaking was not due to an earthquake.
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